Your scraper worked for months. Now it returns 429 Too Many Requests , a challenge page, or empty product data.

The tempting response is to buy a more expensive proxy pool.

That may help when the exit IP is the actual problem. But a proxy cannot fix every failure. A scraper can also be too bursty, lose session state between requests, misread an error page as valid content, or rely on a page structure that has changed.

Before changing providers, measure what is failing.

In this post, we’ll run a small experiment against a local mock website . It simulates a simple rate limit and session cookie. We’ll compare:

A burst of requests with no delay.

Requests spaced according to the server’s Retry-After response.

The example uses only Python’s standard library, so it runs without credentials, third-party packages, or external targets.…